firing

If you’re firing me, get on with it

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Last week we had an email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella of which the kindest thing you could say was that it was less embarrassing than his previous one. I tried reading it for here, to see if there were any actual news items in it that I would want to tell you, and I just glazed over. Others ripped it apart to mock, many ripped it apart to say there was one fact buried in this palimpsest of overlapping indecipherable sentences.

It was that Microsoft sounded pretty damn likely to lay off a lot of people very soon. They’ve now been laid off.

But the actual blow, the news of their redundancy came after another obfuscated email. This time, it took eleven paragraphs before it got to the point and one writer rips it apart par by par.

Typically, when you’re a top executive at a major corporation that is laying off more than 10 percent of your workforce, you say a few things to the newly jobless. Like “sorry.” Or “thank you for your many years of service.” Or even “we hate doing this, but it’s necessary to help the company survive.”

What you don’t do is bury the news of the layoffs in the 11th paragraph of a long, rambling corporate strategy memo.

And yet, this was Microsoft honcho Stephen Elop’s preferred method for announcing to his employees today that 12,500 of them were being laid off. (18,000 are being laid off companywide; Elop, the former head of Nokia, oversees the company’s devices unit, which was hardest hit by the layoffs.)

How bad was Elop’s job-axing memo? Really, really bad. It’s so bad that I can’t even really convey its badness. I just have to show you.

Here’s how it starts:

Hello there

Hello there? Hello there? Out of all the possible “you’re losing your job” greetings, you chose the one that sounds like the start to a bad OKCupid message? “Hello there” isn’t how you announce layoffs; it’s what you say right before you ask, “What’s a girl like you doing on a site like this? ;)” It’s the fedora of greetings.

Microsoft Just Laid Off Thousands of Employees With a Hilariously Bad Memo – Kevin Roose, NY Mag (17 July 2014)

It’s not funny for the people who’ve lost their jobs, which is the main point of Roose’s piece. It’s also easy to say that you shouldn’t do it in this way, but actually, no. You shouldn’t. Take a read at Roose’s whole piece.

Get paid to quit your job

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I’ve worked with people for whom I would’ve chipped in a lot of money if it meant they’d leave. But it’s becoming a thing. If you can have a thing where only two firms do it.

Riot Games, the maker of the hugely popular PC game “League of Legends,” pays unhappy employees up to $25,000 to quit their jobs — even if they just joined the company. The company does this because it doesn’t want to keep staffers who are struggling or who aren’t a good fit with the company culture.
“Rather than allow mismatches to fester, we want to resolve them quickly. This is good for the company, and good for the professional. … we’ll learn from this and make better hiring decisions as a result,” the company said in a blog post announcing the program.

This Company Pays Employees $25,000 To Quit — No Strings Attached — Even If They Were Just Hired – Jim Edwards, Business Insider (20 June 2014)

I’ve not heard of Riot Games or of League of Legends but I have heard of a little startup company called Amazon:

The second program is called Pay to Quit. It was invented by the clever people at Zappos, and the Amazon fulfillment centers have been iterating on it. Pay to Quit is pretty simple. Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is “Please Don’t Take This Offer.” We hope they don’t take the offer; we want them to stay. Why do we make this offer? The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don’t want to be isn’t healthy for the employee or the company.

Amazon Pays Its Staff Up To $5,000 If They Quit — No Strings Attached – Jim Edwards (10 April 2014)

You can see how either system might be abused but you can also see that you wouldn’t want to be offered the get-out money from Riot. Maybe if you qualified for the full $25,000 you might think about it some more, but even in computing, it doesn’t look great to have a two-month job on your CV and the explanation that they paid you to go away and never come back.